And it doesn't make you hit rats 50 times with a stick, either.
I hear a lot of people make that complaint. The vast majority of these people don't realize what other options are out there.
For instance, there's a popular series of text-based games known as RPIs, or Role-Play Intensives. In these games, there is no arbitrary point system of advancement. Does that mean there's no room for advancement? No.
You see, the world is incredibly rich, with various power structures and players in a position to confer genuine authority. There's no formula to it. Perhaps you can sell your skills and become a hired hand. Maybe your heritage entitles you to noble privileges, if the setting is medieval. As a merchant, you'll be involved in city politics and be in a position of influence. Or perhaps you could be deeply involved in one of the world's many variously flavored churches in matters both internal and external.
When you start these games, you spend a lot of time developing a character, complete with backstory set in the rich world upon which the game is based. These games have role-play administrators who are responsible for verifying the quality of these applications, helping new players, and generally policing the in-character nature. While most of the play tends to be wonderfully player driven, the role-play administrators support the players and also create a few well-made plots of their own, often including a large over-arching story.
In these MUDs, the playerbase drifts away from the immature segment you find on hack n'slash games. You'll find mostly college-aged students and middle-aged history buffs (often SCA types), as well as some bright and responsible younger folk.
One of the ones I've enjoyed is Harshlands set in the Harn role-playing universe.
A more popular RPI, though slightly more combat-oriented, is Armageddon, which you can learn about here.
With regards to your last point, it's true that the individual being important is a relatively new concept, socially speaking, as you say. But we didn't go from social-centric rights to individual-centric rights (if I might so blatantly abuse the English language). We distilled family-centric into individual-centric.
Family-centric was cool, because as a legal system, it had a heck of a lot more closure. Under vendetta law, even murder could be "paid for" by sacrificing a comparable member of the aggressor family to the victim family (servitude or blood). Of course, murder can't really be repaid to individualistic victims. Of course, we still patch up much of our broken system of individual rights with fun little legal terms like, "next of kin."
It's a great tool for standardizing your service & product people. Just set up your billing apps, customer service apps, and production apps on a powerful Win2K server, and give everybody cheap, low-powered ghosted PCs running the Terminal Services Clients. It doesn't get more low-maintenance than that.
My favorite comedic book of all time has to be Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett's joint work Good Omens. Terry's longwindedness gets a little tiresome at times, but it's definitely a great book if you want to get an immediate appreciation of Gaiman. Make it your first title.:)
Oh, certainly! I always found it interesting that the Chinese faced imperialism with a kind of "Don't change our way of life and we'll trade in the goods we're interested in," which while noble, culture-preserving, and laissez-faire ultimately resulted in the downfall of their expansive empire.
This is as opposed to Japan. When Commodore Perry fired off his cannon salute, the Japanese reaction was, "Oh, yes, we're very interested in trade. Why don't you start by showing us those cannons?"
What's the moral? When faced with a superior force, give in, become friends, conform, and hope that the last decimated shreds of your culture work its way into some kind of Greco-Romanish composite. Hey, I didn't say it was a good moral. Life sucks sometimes.:)
You think that's bad? Try the nuclear artillery piece known as the Davy Crockett. It has the distinction of being the only weapon with a blast radius greater than its range.:D
Yeah, my general sense of the culture is that it's considered self-mastery to surpress your ego and fall into your place and effectively and as efficiently as possible to achieve results like he achieved.
Further, "fights" over patents, and particularly any legal battle, would typically be highly frowned upon. There's kind of a sacred relationship and obligation between the employer and employee to work things out on a relational basis.
Did you know that Toyota developed the Rav4 to keep employees busy when newer factories required less manual labor? In fact, the first design for the Rav4 was so efficiently labor unintensive, that it didn't use enough employees, so they changed the design to require more manual welds.
It seems Professor Nakamura's time in America and the scent of money has made him given him an unfortunate helping of Western decadence. *wink*
A lot of rights are tied to property. If I am truly responsible for my home, I have the right to say who or who cannot be in it, and therefore can regulate the actions of any who dwell therein on penalty of expulsion.
In my private domain, I can say what I want. People can, of their own volition, come over and listen to me make hateful, witty, erotic, or intriguing commetary of any sort.
It's the true-autonomy reflection of the 1st amendment. People aren't limited in what they say. By reflection, people aren't required to listen to anything.
If we lived in an inconsequent-domain universe such as that layed out in Greg Egan's Diaspora, this type of autonomy would be flawless. Unfortunately, there are publically held areas that are required, for example, to get from one place to another.
You can go two routes. Say that no one owns the land, therefore anything goes. Or, say that the general public owns the land, so that by general consensus, a set regulations intendid to set a standard of "common decency" is proposed. I happen to like this latter solution.
I feel that, ideally, responding to yelling 'fire' in a theater falls under the domain of the the theater owners. The way the government is set up, though, doesn't give much penal power to private owners, and so theaters submit to public standards in exchange for public penalty. It's better that way.
In my mind, Asimov is closer to the truth. For me, the sole requirement of the Science Fiction genre is that it add a new, rationally self-consistent element to the universe, and hinge the plot around the resultant implications.
Take magic and demons. A lot of stories will just conjure plot elements of a mystical nature, using it as a backdrop or tools for the plot. That's just fantasy.
But a fantastic example of non-techie science fiction is the works of Zelazny. In his works, the plot hinges on mystical elements added to the universe. In the Incarnations of Immortality series, for example, the books hinge on the implications of the idea that the vital, metaphysical functions of the universe are tended by a set of demi-human avatars./Lord Demon/ was based off of the conflict generated by a race of demons being cut off from the Chi required to maintain the strength of their progeny.
On the other hand, Star Wars is just a plot that takes its flavor from the futuristic (or rather, advanced-ancient) theme. Regardless of the props, it's pure fantasy.
This is as opposed to something like Greg Egan's Diaspora, which is a novel that has its entire plot written as kind of an exploratory analysis of the implications of reproducable "human" consciousnesses being contained in a truly autonomous and arbitrary metaverse which is capable of roaming the physical galaxy. (I highly recommend this title.)
For me, this is the most direct and unmuddled way of thinking of the distinction science fiction and fantasy.
It takes a while to get into the swing of Rune, but once you've gotten down the basics of timing and facing, you can slug it out with another player for several minutes. Each weapon requires a different offensive strategy, and each opponent weapon requires a different defensive strategy.
It's a lot of fun. My only beef is with some of the cheesy powerups, which can mercifully be mutated out of the game.
It's bad if your having latency problems, but if you can keep it below 200, there should be little problem. Keep trying.
(If it is your opinion that discussing the very nature of discourse is over-intellectualization, you would be well advised to skip this message.)
Do not disregard constructivism so quickly.
Objective models strictly about reality can be used as an approximation of reality itself. However, once you, for example, enter the individual into some kind of context or, I pose, set up expression with any implication of making judgement, you have trespassed into subjective assumptions in the creation of your objective model.
The idea behind constructivism is that in order for individuals to agree on a certain judgement, they must begin with a common frame of reference.
A Republican and a Democrat may disagree in actual argument, but usually that is due to some severance in their underlying assumptions. The problem is that enlightened discourse rarely occurs between the parties as the underlying assumptions are rarely discussed behind those big white pillars.
"Computer types" tend to have an affinity for constructivism as it is logical, allows for absolute judgement within a context, makes no assumptions, and acts like an object-oriented programming language.
An object-oriented programming language? Sure! There's a whole library of assumptions you can "implement interfaces" from. Inherit the ones you need, ditch the ones you don't in order to expand your prospective audience. I imagine that's how AI will operate some day.
To digress, that interface inheritance thing is a good point. Many of my ideas are grounded in civil libertarianism, while a close friend at X liberal arts school next door buys wholeheartedly into the society-organism social engineering setup. We can still have innumerable insightful and -resolving- discussions on all kinds of things by dropping the inessentials. Even in unresolved conversations, we use constructivist notions to see where the separation lies and consequently respect our differences.
It may seem to some that I have simply reiterated here the very definition of an argument here. I simply think people don't realize how far reaching the impacts of these simple notions are when properly applied.
A.J. Roxton, Lord Captain of the Queen's Royal Armies
AEJ's a nifty old-school admin with a lot of cool ideas. He resonates more with the "slashdot community" (a dubious phrase, granted) than you might expect. After hanging out with Gregory Shapiro, a (the?) primary Sendmail contributor, you might expect a little of that to rub off, eh? =)
Laissez-Faire under Benevolent Dictatorship
on
Carl Kadie Responds
·
· Score: 1
I am actually a student at WPI doing one of my three major academic projects, the IQP, as a study of network use policy in competitive-level engineering and liberal arts schools.
After interviewing the senior system administrators at WPI, I have come to the conclusion that WPI operates as a laissez-faire environment emulated under a benevolent dictatorship. If memory serves, the network administrator used to work under a similar position under a defense contract firm, and has systems in place that could easily enable the staff to lock down practically every action that occurs on the WPI network.
But even though locking the network down could make his life a lot easier, he doesn't. He usually only puts his foot down in the path of anything that directly impedes academic activity. In the vast majority of cases, this means excessive bandwidth consumption. That, in it of itself, is good policy.
The problem is that this good system sits entirely on top of the staff's good will. Under the present AUP, the staff could radically change the system environment without violating a single rule, and as far as I can tell, the WPI administrative faculty wouldn't give a damn.
Still, you're going to find an interesting dichotomy among these schools. While my team is still researching this premise, it seems a very clear possibility that those schools with the heavier-handed policies offer their students the most protections. If some third party company or individual comes to WPI complaining about activity, even illegal activity from the campus network, the sysadmin staff will not reveal the perpetrator's information unless presented with a subpoena. When sent threatening correspondence from the RIAA, WPI hardly flinched.
A more liberal school which allows virtually any activity, claiming, for all intents and purposes, a common carrier status may be far more likely to reveal information to third parties, making the student directly responsible for any activity.
I'm not one to say which is better. I know I feel very comfortable using WPI's top-notch network. Where else can a club make money using WPI resources to host an FPS shooter tournament[If you're in the Boston or Greater Worcester area, drop me an e-mail for details]?
-Adam "Roxton" Augusta
Lord Captain of the Queen's Armies
True. But I've heard three personal reports that claim disabling by simply putting the robot in a compromised position is the only consistently workable strategy.
The article claims that the BattleBots organization "is already the world's largest robot competition in terms [...] of the number of contestants."
There's a non-profit educational organization known as FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which easily outnumbers BattleBots in terms of entrants. Last year, FIRST had 269 teams participating, and this year, the number of registered teams is greater than 350. I was unable to count more than 73 entrants for BattleBots.
BattleBots, however, targets an audience far broader, as FIRST is only attended by corporation-sponsored high schools. As others have noted, however, the strategy in BattleBots is mind-bogglingly limited, as the only objective is to flip the other guy over. With the FIRST competitions, a varying number of teams contend on the field to collect the most points, with the playing field and scoring methods changing each year... as well as the loopholes!;-)
I hope to see more gutsy robot wars in the future- perhaps a fighter's circle where physical violence is allowed, given that the robot is designed and built to certain specs.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear a lot of people make that complaint. The vast majority of these people don't realize what other options are out there.
For instance, there's a popular series of text-based games known as RPIs, or Role-Play Intensives. In these games, there is no arbitrary point system of advancement. Does that mean there's no room for advancement? No.
You see, the world is incredibly rich, with various power structures and players in a position to confer genuine authority. There's no formula to it. Perhaps you can sell your skills and become a hired hand. Maybe your heritage entitles you to noble privileges, if the setting is medieval. As a merchant, you'll be involved in city politics and be in a position of influence. Or perhaps you could be deeply involved in one of the world's many variously flavored churches in matters both internal and external.
When you start these games, you spend a lot of time developing a character, complete with backstory set in the rich world upon which the game is based. These games have role-play administrators who are responsible for verifying the quality of these applications, helping new players, and generally policing the in-character nature. While most of the play tends to be wonderfully player driven, the role-play administrators support the players and also create a few well-made plots of their own, often including a large over-arching story.
In these MUDs, the playerbase drifts away from the immature segment you find on hack n'slash games. You'll find mostly college-aged students and middle-aged history buffs (often SCA types), as well as some bright and responsible younger folk.
One of the ones I've enjoyed is Harshlands set in the Harn role-playing universe.
A more popular RPI, though slightly more combat-oriented, is Armageddon, which you can learn about here.
-Roxton
With regards to your last point, it's true that the individual being important is a relatively new concept, socially speaking, as you say. But we didn't go from social-centric rights to individual-centric rights (if I might so blatantly abuse the English language). We distilled family-centric into individual-centric.
Family-centric was cool, because as a legal system, it had a heck of a lot more closure. Under vendetta law, even murder could be "paid for" by sacrificing a comparable member of the aggressor family to the victim family (servitude or blood). Of course, murder can't really be repaid to individualistic victims. Of course, we still patch up much of our broken system of individual rights with fun little legal terms like, "next of kin."
-Roxton
It's called Terminal Services.
It's a great tool for standardizing your service & product people. Just set up your billing apps, customer service apps, and production apps on a powerful Win2K server, and give everybody cheap, low-powered ghosted PCs running the Terminal Services Clients. It doesn't get more low-maintenance than that.
My favorite comedic book of all time has to be Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett's joint work Good Omens. Terry's longwindedness gets a little tiresome at times, but it's definitely a great book if you want to get an immediate appreciation of Gaiman. Make it your first title. :)
Aww, if I knew I'd get modded up for posting on offtopic, I wouldn't have posted anonymously. No, I didn't cut and paste. =D
-Adam
Oh, certainly! I always found it interesting that the Chinese faced imperialism with a kind of "Don't change our way of life and we'll trade in the goods we're interested in," which while noble, culture-preserving, and laissez-faire ultimately resulted in the downfall of their expansive empire.
This is as opposed to Japan. When Commodore Perry fired off his cannon salute, the Japanese reaction was, "Oh, yes, we're very interested in trade. Why don't you start by showing us those cannons?"
What's the moral? When faced with a superior force, give in, become friends, conform, and hope that the last decimated shreds of your culture work its way into some kind of Greco-Romanish composite. Hey, I didn't say it was a good moral. Life sucks sometimes. :)
-Roxton, Jedi Hobbit with a Ph.D. in Necromancy
-=Roxton
Yeah, my general sense of the culture is that it's considered self-mastery to surpress your ego and fall into your place and effectively and as efficiently as possible to achieve results like he achieved.
Further, "fights" over patents, and particularly any legal battle, would typically be highly frowned upon. There's kind of a sacred relationship and obligation between the employer and employee to work things out on a relational basis.
Did you know that Toyota developed the Rav4 to keep employees busy when newer factories required less manual labor? In fact, the first design for the Rav4 was so efficiently labor unintensive, that it didn't use enough employees, so they changed the design to require more manual welds.
It seems Professor Nakamura's time in America and the scent of money has made him given him an unfortunate helping of Western decadence. *wink*
-Adam
A lot of rights are tied to property. If I am truly responsible for my home, I have the right to say who or who cannot be in it, and therefore can regulate the actions of any who dwell therein on penalty of expulsion.
In my private domain, I can say what I want. People can, of their own volition, come over and listen to me make hateful, witty, erotic, or intriguing commetary of any sort.
It's the true-autonomy reflection of the 1st amendment. People aren't limited in what they say. By reflection, people aren't required to listen to anything.
If we lived in an inconsequent-domain universe such as that layed out in Greg Egan's Diaspora, this type of autonomy would be flawless. Unfortunately, there are publically held areas that are required, for example, to get from one place to another.
You can go two routes. Say that no one owns the land, therefore anything goes. Or, say that the general public owns the land, so that by general consensus, a set regulations intendid to set a standard of "common decency" is proposed. I happen to like this latter solution.
I feel that, ideally, responding to yelling 'fire' in a theater falls under the domain of the the theater owners. The way the government is set up, though, doesn't give much penal power to private owners, and so theaters submit to public standards in exchange for public penalty. It's better that way.
-Adam
In my mind, Asimov is closer to the truth. For me, the sole requirement of the Science Fiction genre is that it add a new, rationally self-consistent element to the universe, and hinge the plot around the resultant implications.
/Lord Demon/ was based off of the conflict generated by a race of demons being cut off from the Chi required to maintain the strength of their progeny.
Take magic and demons. A lot of stories will just conjure plot elements of a mystical nature, using it as a backdrop or tools for the plot. That's just fantasy.
But a fantastic example of non-techie science fiction is the works of Zelazny. In his works, the plot hinges on mystical elements added to the universe. In the Incarnations of Immortality series, for example, the books hinge on the implications of the idea that the vital, metaphysical functions of the universe are tended by a set of demi-human avatars.
On the other hand, Star Wars is just a plot that takes its flavor from the futuristic (or rather, advanced-ancient) theme. Regardless of the props, it's pure fantasy.
This is as opposed to something like Greg Egan's Diaspora, which is a novel that has its entire plot written as kind of an exploratory analysis of the implications of reproducable "human" consciousnesses being contained in a truly autonomous and arbitrary metaverse which is capable of roaming the physical galaxy. (I highly recommend this title.)
For me, this is the most direct and unmuddled way of thinking of the distinction science fiction and fantasy.
-=Roxton
It takes a while to get into the swing of Rune, but once you've gotten down the basics of timing and facing, you can slug it out with another player for several minutes. Each weapon requires a different offensive strategy, and each opponent weapon requires a different defensive strategy.
It's a lot of fun. My only beef is with some of the cheesy powerups, which can mercifully be mutated out of the game.
It's bad if your having latency problems, but if you can keep it below 200, there should be little problem. Keep trying.
(If it is your opinion that discussing the very nature of discourse is over-intellectualization, you would be well advised to skip this message.)
Do not disregard constructivism so quickly.
Objective models strictly about reality can be used as an approximation of reality itself. However, once you, for example, enter the individual into some kind of context or, I pose, set up expression with any implication of making judgement, you have trespassed into subjective assumptions in the creation of your objective model.
The idea behind constructivism is that in order for individuals to agree on a certain judgement, they must begin with a common frame of reference.
A Republican and a Democrat may disagree in actual argument, but usually that is due to some severance in their underlying assumptions. The problem is that enlightened discourse rarely occurs between the parties as the underlying assumptions are rarely discussed behind those big white pillars.
"Computer types" tend to have an affinity for constructivism as it is logical, allows for absolute judgement within a context, makes no assumptions, and acts like an object-oriented programming language.
An object-oriented programming language? Sure! There's a whole library of assumptions you can "implement interfaces" from. Inherit the ones you need, ditch the ones you don't in order to expand your prospective audience. I imagine that's how AI will operate some day.
To digress, that interface inheritance thing is a good point. Many of my ideas are grounded in civil libertarianism, while a close friend at X liberal arts school next door buys wholeheartedly into the society-organism social engineering setup. We can still have innumerable insightful and -resolving- discussions on all kinds of things by dropping the inessentials. Even in unresolved conversations, we use constructivist notions to see where the separation lies and consequently respect our differences.
It may seem to some that I have simply reiterated here the very definition of an argument here. I simply think people don't realize how far reaching the impacts of these simple notions are when properly applied.
A.J. Roxton, Lord Captain of the Queen's Royal Armies
AEJ's a nifty old-school admin with a lot of cool ideas. He resonates more with the "slashdot community" (a dubious phrase, granted) than you might expect. After hanging out with Gregory Shapiro, a (the?) primary Sendmail contributor, you might expect a little of that to rub off, eh? =)
I am actually a student at WPI doing one of my three major academic projects, the IQP, as a study of network use policy in competitive-level engineering and liberal arts schools.
After interviewing the senior system administrators at WPI, I have come to the conclusion that WPI operates as a laissez-faire environment emulated under a benevolent dictatorship. If memory serves, the network administrator used to work under a similar position under a defense contract firm, and has systems in place that could easily enable the staff to lock down practically every action that occurs on the WPI network.
But even though locking the network down could make his life a lot easier, he doesn't. He usually only puts his foot down in the path of anything that directly impedes academic activity. In the vast majority of cases, this means excessive bandwidth consumption. That, in it of itself, is good policy.
The problem is that this good system sits entirely on top of the staff's good will. Under the present AUP, the staff could radically change the system environment without violating a single rule, and as far as I can tell, the WPI administrative faculty wouldn't give a damn.
Still, you're going to find an interesting dichotomy among these schools. While my team is still researching this premise, it seems a very clear possibility that those schools with the heavier-handed policies offer their students the most protections. If some third party company or individual comes to WPI complaining about activity, even illegal activity from the campus network, the sysadmin staff will not reveal the perpetrator's information unless presented with a subpoena. When sent threatening correspondence from the RIAA, WPI hardly flinched.
A more liberal school which allows virtually any activity, claiming, for all intents and purposes, a common carrier status may be far more likely to reveal information to third parties, making the student directly responsible for any activity.
I'm not one to say which is better. I know I feel very comfortable using WPI's top-notch network. Where else can a club make money using WPI resources to host an FPS shooter tournament[If you're in the Boston or Greater Worcester area, drop me an e-mail for details]?
-Adam "Roxton" Augusta
Lord Captain of the Queen's Armies
Sweetenly, Boston's NPR news station provides a live webcast.
http://www.wbur.org
I'm not sure what the variation in programming is for the local station, but you can't fail with Science Friday.
-=Adam "sign-here-to-secede-your-land-to-my-government" Roxton
They said both were superior, not by some kind of abstract some of apple and oranges. Clearly, I can address either without fault.
True. But I've heard three personal reports that claim disabling by simply putting the robot in a compromised position is the only consistently workable strategy.
The article claims that the BattleBots organization "is already the world's largest robot competition in terms [...] of the number of contestants."
;-)
There's a non-profit educational organization known as FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which easily outnumbers BattleBots in terms of entrants. Last year, FIRST had 269 teams participating, and this year, the number of registered teams is greater than 350. I was unable to count more than 73 entrants for BattleBots.
BattleBots, however, targets an audience far broader, as FIRST is only attended by corporation-sponsored high schools. As others have noted, however, the strategy in BattleBots is mind-bogglingly limited, as the only objective is to flip the other guy over. With the FIRST competitions, a varying number of teams contend on the field to collect the most points, with the playing field and scoring methods changing each year... as well as the loopholes!
I hope to see more gutsy robot wars in the future- perhaps a fighter's circle where physical violence is allowed, given that the robot is designed and built to certain specs.